AmEx Express Checkout is similar to the way PayPal works. If you see an AmEx checkout button when paying for an item with an online merchant, you login using your AmEx online credentials, choose the AmEx card you want to pay with, and the transaction is complete. AmEx will autofill all the shipping and billing information as well. And the card member's account information is transferred to the merchant securely, says AmEx.

As a security protection, each time card members click on the AmEx Express Checkout button on a merchant site, they will be required to login.

At launch, AmEx has partnered with a number of high-profile online merchants including Burberry, Tory Burch, The Wall Street Journal, Ticketmaster, Avis Car Rental, Cole Haan, Warby Parker, and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM.

Merchants who use Stripe, a technology that lets businesses accept online payments, will also be able to integrate AmEx Express Checkout using Stripe's existing technology.

AmEx checkout aims squarely at PayPal’s own merchant offerings, which has long offered consumers a way to sign and pay for items online using their PayPal account. Similar to AmEx Checkout, PayPal allows people to store multiple credit and debit cards in one account and send money from these different credit card accounts to merchants or people. Of course, with AmEx Checkout, the wallet is a bit more sparse as you can only use the financial services company’s credit cards, whereas with PayPal you can use Mastercard or Visa cards. Visa and Mastercard have their own merchant checkout options as well.

The other competitor is the merchants themselves, who store credit card info in customer accounts for repeat use. But AmEx says that the majority of consumers don't actually create separate accounts with each merchant, and merchants face problems like shopping card abandonment when it comes to the complexity of entering credit card details at checkout.

AmEx also says that the majority of card holders have online accounts and pay their bills online, so most shoppers who want to pay with their cards will have a login.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/american-express-checkout/feed/0American Express Co. Credit Cards 2013leenakraoMasterCard wants to let you buy stuff with your facehttp://fortune.com/2015/07/01/mastercard-facial-recognition/
http://fortune.com/2015/07/01/mastercard-facial-recognition/#commentsWed, 01 Jul 2015 15:25:33 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1198826]]>Forget your fingerprint – MasterCard is testing out a program that would let you make online purchases with your face.

The company will roll out a pilot program this fall giving customers the option of facial recognition as a way of making payments. Hold up your phone, see your mirror image inside a designated circle, blink once, and it’s done. ”

The new generation, which is into selfies . . . I think they’ll find it cool. They’ll embrace it,” Ajay Bhalla, MasterCard President of Enterprise Safety and Security, told CNNMoney.

The facial recognition test is a part of the company’s grand vision to do away with passwords for online payments. MasterCard previously outlined a future where static passwords are replaced by biometric scans, voice recognition and a wristband which authenticates a cardholder through their unique cardiac rhythm. With payments on mobile devices expected to represent 30% of all online retail sales by 2018, it pays for MasterCard to test out new ways of, well, paying.

MasterCard’s facial recognition will roll out to only about 500 users at first. Major hardware and software companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft and BlackBerry are reportedly on board with the venture, along with two major banks. If it all goes well – and your phone can tell the difference between your unique face and that of your spendy baby brother’s – MasterCard could launch the feature publicly soon after.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/07/01/mastercard-facial-recognition/feed/0#F5002015 MasterCardjchew1271EBay announces date of PayPal spinoffhttp://fortune.com/2015/06/26/ebay-paypal-split-date/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/26/ebay-paypal-split-date/#commentsFri, 26 Jun 2015 21:00:41 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1194638]]>Online marketplace eBay announced Friday that its separation from payment processing company PayPal will take place on July 17, after eBay’s board of directors gave its final stamp of approval.

Both companies will become independent and publicly traded companies after that date.

"eBay and PayPal are two great, special businesses," said eBay CEO John Donahoe in a statement. "As separate, independent companies, eBay, led by Devin Wenig, and PayPal, led by Dan Schulman, will each have a sharper focus and greater flexibility to pursue future success in their respective global commerce and payments markets.”

Donahoe added: “I am confident that eBay and PayPal each have the right leadership team, strategy, structure and operational discipline to create sustainable, long-term value for stockholders and deliver great opportunities and experiences for customers worldwide."

The news comes after eBay posted stronger than expected first quarter earnings, but sales of items in the site’s marketplace dropped 4% to $2 billion.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/26/ebay-paypal-split-date/feed/0Ebay Reports Quarterly EarningssnyderfortunePayments company WePay raises $40 million to go globalhttp://fortune.com/2015/05/20/wepay-funding-payments/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/wepay-funding-payments/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 12:00:50 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1128655]]>WePay, a company that processes payments for websites, has raised $40 million in new funding to expand globally.

New investor FTV Capital led the round, with Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten and existing investors Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, Continental Investors and Ignition Partners also participating.

WePay originally launched as an easier way for groups to collect money and make payments to each other. Over the past two years, however, WePay pivoted to handling payments for online marketplaces, donation sites, and other web businesses, including GoFundMe and Care.com

Rivals include Stripe, a hot payment processing company that was recently valued at $3 billion and has deals in place with Apple and Twitter. Another is Braintree, which was acquired by digital payments service PayPal in 2013 for $800 million.

Bill Clerico, WePay’s CEO, argued that his company is different from competitors in that it focuses on marketplaces as customers. The rise of services like Airbnb and Uber, which connect buyers and sellers, creates complex challenges with payments that only a company like his can take on.

Specifically, Clerico said that WePay helps reduce the risk of payment fraud for its business customers. To illustrate the dangers, he gave the example of a crowdfunding campaign created by fraudsters who then fund the phony project with stolen credit cards. The crowdfunding platform would normally be on the hook for the amount stolen using these cards.

Clerico says that WePay's patented risk and fraud detection is sophisticated enough to catch most, if not all, of these types of theft, saving the sites’ money. If WePay's technology doesn't catch the fraud, the company will take financial responsibility for the transactions, he said.

WePay, which charges companies 2.9% of each transaction amount plus 30 cents, says its revenue more than doubled in the first quarter compared with a year ago. The company said it processes billions in payments annually, but did not offer a specific number.

The latest funding is a Series D, or a later stage round. Overall, the six year-old company has raised $75 million in venture funding.

For more about startup fundings, watch this Fortune video:

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/wepay-funding-payments/feed/0140519113048-money-dollar-sign-620xaleenakraoGoogle Wallet creator gives credit card terminals a serious facelifthttp://fortune.com/2014/10/29/google-wallet-creator-gives-credit-card-terminals-a-serious-facelift/
http://fortune.com/2014/10/29/google-wallet-creator-gives-credit-card-terminals-a-serious-facelift/#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 06:58:31 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=839888]]>With PayPal, Apple AAPL, Amazon AMZN and others all vying to make a buck off processing people’s money, the payments space is more competitive than ever. But Google Wallet inventor Osama Bedier insists his new startup can go toe-to-toe with the best of them.

On Wednesday, his company, Poynt, introduced a slimmed-down version of those bulky grey credit card readers with numeric keypads found at many large U.S. stores. The sales pitch is that its terminals pack far more technology than those of the incumbents, which have dominated the market for years.

“Over the last 5 years, I spent a lot of time thinking about how online and offline commerce come together,” Bedier says. “I came to the conclusion that commerce is broken and needs to be fixed.”

Technology has advanced tremendously since the first point of sale terminals appeared in the early 1980s. Today’s smartphones are just as powerful as computers from that era.

Sensing an opportunity, companies ranging from tech giants to start-ups are trying to grab different pieces of the payments business. Terminals, online payments and payments between friends are all under attack.

Getting merchants to rely on an untested company for a critical part of their business will be a challenge for Poynt. VeriFone PAY and Ingenico ING, two companies that dominate the market, will have a clear advantage.

“When it’s all said and done, this is a device that requires merchants to actually purchase and install it,” says Dana Stalder, a venture capitalist with Poynt investor Matrix Partners and a former colleague of Bedier’s. “It will take time [for Poynt] to build out a platform.”

Bedier also faces a challenge from upstarts like Square, which helps mostly small merchants process credit card transactions. For years, the startup focus on small card readers that attach to smartphones and tablets -- in lieu of selling terminals -- before branching out into other services like Square Cash, which lets people pay each another through email.

Still, if anyone has a good shot, it’s Bedier, Stalder says.

Bedier founded the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Poynt last year with an undisclosed sum from backers including Matrix Partners and Google Ventures. He has a long history in payments, having helped develop Google Wallet, a mobile locker for storing credit and debit card information. The service got a lot of attention when it was introduced in 2011 as a convenient way to shop online, but it has since mostly gone sideways.

When available early next year, the Poynt Smart Terminal will be cutting edge, at least as far as such payments terminals go. It will have two touch screens – one facing the shopper, another facing the merchant. It will also connect wirelessly via 4G Internet access and come with a built-in printer and barcode scanner.

More importantly, the device processes electronic payments beyond the traditional credit and debit cards. Shoppers can use cards that have a security chip called EMV, which is standard in most of Europe and is considered better at preventing fraud. They can also pay by holding their smartphones near the terminal, a technology known as near-field communications that is used in Apple’s new payments system. Another option is to pay or redeem discounts via QR codes, those square, pixelated images resembling digital Rorschach tests.

To attract customers, Bedier suggests he will sell his terminal for around $300, which is at or near-cost. The Verifones of the world see healthy profit margins on their terminals, but it’s on the software side Poynt hopes to eventually make money.

The device will launch with at least three apps including one that approximates a cash register. The start-up hopes outside software developers will want to develop more apps and services on top of it.

Poynt is currently in talks to partner with the top five U.S. banks, a shortlist that typically includes Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Banks have traditionally sold and distributed terminals directly to merchants as part of their business accounts.

Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner Research, argues the timing is right for a company like Poynt. In the wake of data security breaches and rising credit card fraud, U.S. merchants are trying to upgrade to technologies that support the EMV credit cards by October of next year.

“These old, blind companies don’t innovate that quickly,” Litan says, who spends hours on the phone most days with merchants complaining that upgrading to EMV is a difficult process. “This has never been an exciting industry, but it is a fertile area for innovation.”

The Ukrainian-born entrepreneur minted his reputation as something of a Silicon Valley superstar after co-founding the online payments service PayPal in the late 1990s. Levchin served as PayPal’s chief technology officer for four years, during which time he built the complex software that kept the Website operating while staffing up the engineering team. All the effort paid off big when eBay EBAY acquired PayPal for a cool $1.5 billion seven years ago (He reportedly banked $34 million.) Afterwards, Levchin had five-year run heading up mobile game maker Slide before selling it to Google, where he briefly served as vice president of engineering.

But for the last two years, Levchin has tried reinventing online payments, much the same way he did with PayPal. His latest start-up, Affirm, tackles consumer loans, but with a twist. Generally speaking, it’s a substitute for credit cards. “It turns out there's lots of data there about someone, and a lot of it is completely relevant,” explains Levchin.

Here’s how it works: Customers of online retailers that partner with Affirm partner can choose SplitPay as an option when they’re about to buy something. To determine eligibility, Affirm weighs tens of thousands of different bits of information about a person. Traditional credit approval usually relies on FICO scores, which are based on five categories including a person’s credit payment history, debt, the length of credit history, any new credit and kind of credit they use. Affirm takes that information into account, plus much, much more like whether an applicant has a Facebook FB profile (which can be helpful in proving someone’s identity) to whether that person has had their cell phone account closed several times (a red flag). The goal is to deduce from such public and private data whether an applicant is worth the risk – a process Levchin says he has improved over the way traditional credit scores are calculated.

Loans can range from tens of dollars to upwards of $10,000, with the interest rate and number of payments decided on a case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, Affirm pays the online retailer the full amount of the customer’s purchase within 48 hours from its pile of $45 million in venture-backed funding. Affirm has just four retailers signed up, including cosmetics retailer Beautylish and Blossom Coffee, but the company expects to announce new partners every week moving forward.

To be sure, Affirm has a lot to prove. There are a number of startups like LendUp and Earnest that are tinkering with the idea of approving loans based on information culled from unconventional sources. Affirm also runs up against other, more established services like Bill Me Later, eBay’s layaway program. It also competes, to some extent, with Lending Club, which bases its risk calculations on the income of loan recipients and has already lent more than $4 billion.

Of course, credit card companies already occupy a huge market. But part of Affirm’s potential appeal lies in its more detailed loan approval process. Because it takes into account tens of thousands of bits of data — versus FICO’S five — applicants who don’t have a long credit history, but may be responsible borrowers, are more likely to get approved.

Affirm is one of two startups that came through HVF, the startup incubator Levchin founded in 2010. Currently, HVF is home to at least at least give such potential startups, or “projects.”

“It's like a mad scientist lab where I invite my mad scientist friends to hang out and sit around and try to come up with something interesting for six or seven weeks,” says Levchin.

Aside from Affirm, the other HVF-funded startup graduate is Glow, a fertility app launched last fall aimed at helping couples conceive by tracking information like a woman’s menstrual cycle and offering health tips based on information users add daily. Four months ago, the company introduced Glow for Enterprise so that businesses could offer their employees more fertility benefits beyond the typical health insurance plan. To date, Glow for Enterprise has signed up tech startups like Evernote, Eventbrite, and data software company Domo.

So while Levchin remains busy with multiple projects, he’s focused on taking Affirm mainstream and enjoying the daily minutiae of being CEO. Says Levchin, “I realized that running a company is something that I missed and really enjoyed.”

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/06/24/paypal-co-founder-max-levchin-online-payments/feed/0Kaggle Inc. Chairman Max Levchin InterviewJP MangalindanMove over PayPal, Amazon heats up the payment gamehttp://fortune.com/2014/06/09/paypal-amazon-payments/
http://fortune.com/2014/06/09/paypal-amazon-payments/#commentsMon, 09 Jun 2014 21:06:41 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=635500]]>Amazon announced on Monday that it’s started a service to let customers to manage subscription payments for start-ups and other businesses. This latest move comes as the company seeks to continue diversifying its portfolio and signals the continuation of a turf war with eBay’s Ebay PayPal, which has long been the leader in online payments.

Launched on Monday, the new feature, which is within Amazon’s “Login and Pay” service launched last fall, allows over 240 million customers to use saved credit card information to pay for monthly services, including phone bills and music streaming.

Ting, a mobile carrier and mobile product provider, was the first company to use the new feature in a test over the last few months. They “experienced pretty impressive results in the first few months,” according to Amazon, “including high conversion rates – customers choosing to use Amazon over other payment methods.”

The service is expected to allow customers to more easily track their payments as well as provide “trust and security” for customers seeking added protection.

“You should see it as one of many things that we’ll do to expand where people might think about Amazon helping them,” Tom Taylor, Amazon vice president of seller services, told Reuters.

The news comes ahead of a mystery June 18 announcement by Amazon during which the e-commerce giant is expected to unveil a smartphone. The device would widen Amazon’s role in mobile payments for customers.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/06/09/paypal-amazon-payments/feed/0snyderfortuneStripe’s co-founder on visionaries vs. implementershttp://fortune.com/2013/12/16/stripes-co-founder-on-visionaries-vs-implementers/
http://fortune.com/2013/12/16/stripes-co-founder-on-visionaries-vs-implementers/#commentsMon, 16 Dec 2013 19:12:23 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=637344]]>Patrick Collison, 25-year-old co-founder of global online payment company Stripe, grew up in Ireland. After briefly attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started several companies, including Auctomatic, which he co-founded with his brother John Collison and was later acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008.

Patrick and John now reside in San Francisco, where they founded Stripe, a company that has come to be a disruptor in the global financial system. Stripe's technology allows businesses to circumvent the complexity of currency exchanges with online payments, enabling them to sell products or services to anyone, anywhere, in minutes. Stripe's 80-member team is growing and has raised more than $40 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and PayPal founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk.

Collision, an avid reader and programmer, spoke to Fortune about what technology entrepreneurs and companies he finds most admirable, his laundry list of recently read books, and how to do important work.

1. What business or technology person do you admire most? Why?

In technology, I sorta see people in two camps — the visionaries like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and J.C.R. Licklider who inspired others to do amazing things, like create the web or the Macintosh or whatever, and the implementers like Linus Torvalds, Dennis Ritchie, Vint Cerf, or John Carmack who’ve pulled off incredible technical accomplishments.

I’m still not sure which group is more important. I guess you need both. There are also a few individual people, like Fabrice Bellard, Jeff Dean, and Dan Bernstein, who are just generally fabulously productive and make me feel guilty about how little I get done. I couldn’t pick one person. In general, I have a bias towards people who think about and have built basic infrastructure. It’s informed a lot of our thinking with Stripe.

2. What other companies do you admire? Why?

I admire companies that use time horizons as a competitive advantage — doing things that pay off over a longer timeline than competitors are willing to wait; companies that still do hard, basic research; companies that manage to pay attention to the details even when they’re big; companies that manage to retain a specific mission that’s broader than their business; and companies that try to figure out how an industry should work from first principles.

3. Is business school necessary for entrepreneurs?

I can’t, offhand, think of a great entrepreneur who went to business school.

4. What is the best advice you ever received?

“If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.” That’s from You and Your Research by Richard Hamming, which is a generally good source of life advice.

5. What would you do if you weren't working at your current job?

Probably trying to build or discover something useful somewhere else. Or in a cabin, reading books.

6. What technology sector excites you most?

Software is still fairly early in the process of both systematically rearranging other industries and enabling fundamentally new things, and I’m excited by the ways in which we can help facilitate that. What’s happening in energy, education, health care, biotechnology, and so on — especially the intersection between those fields and software — is also fascinating.

I don’t think it’s really accurate to look at software as a “sector;” software and the Internet are increasingly the atmosphere in which every other business exists.

7. What was the last book you read?

Creating the Twentieth Century by Vaclav Smil — highly recommended — and just before that, Powering the Future by Robert Laughlin, which was also pretty good. The best two books I’ve read this year are The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming and The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop.

8. What do you do for fun?

Cycling, running, reading, programming.

9. What is one goal that you would like to accomplish during your lifetime?

Read all the books.

10. What was your first job?

A friend and I tried to start a technology company when we were 13. It didn’t go very far. I blame market conditions.